Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

USA: Phone camera shutters and women-only cars: Japan’s answers to chikan

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Kasumi Hirokawa, PA, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Recently, I ran into a friend of mine who graduated from Penn State in May. She was on a month-long graduation trip to various locations in the Middle East and Asia, including Japan. She shared her stories of exotic food and unfamiliar customs she came across and I listened eagerly. I always enjoy good travel stories.

She said she enjoyed visiting Asia but was bugged by leering from locals. She attributed it to her being one of very few white girls in the vicinity. People were probably curious, she said. Some would stand too close to her when they hiss “helloooo.” Others would try to take sneaky pictures of her, only to be caught because of their shutter sounds. Street harassment was there to spoil the fun, like always.

Ah, the camera shutters. They were doing something to curb chikan crimes after all. Chikan is a term for a sexual predator and crimes involving one, be it unwanted flashing or groping, in Japan.

I remembered that, in Japan, it is impossible to turn off the shutter sounds on camera phones. Women commuters filed complaints that chikans wouldn’t stop taking upskirt photos in packed train cars. A bill called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which required all mobile devices to have camera shutter sounds that could not be turned off, was proposed in 2009. The camera shutters were sort of a follow-up to women-only train cars that were implemented in 2001.

I haven’t had the experience of owning a camera phone with a mandatory shutter sound or riding a women-only train car since I moved to China, so I am not in a position to say how effective they are in deterring chikans.

While I do not oppose the shutter sounds, I am not fond of women-only train cars. First, they are not always women-only. There are a certain number of designated cars on a train with pink signs on the windows with hours. During those hours (typically rush hours in the morning and the evening), do they become women-only cars.

I know women-only cars were proposed by well-meaning policymakers. However, limiting women’s presence in public spaces is at best reductive and at worst, downright sexist. It’s easy to tell women to ride on designated cars or sign up for self-defense classes. It’s easy to blame a victim that she should have known better than to not get on the women-only car. But women-only cars are not dealing with the problem at its roots: men who harass women on trains. I’d like to see “Beware of chikans!” billboards replaced with ones that say, “Don’t be a chikan! Make public places safe for everyone!”

Kasumi is a recent graduate from Penn State with a BA in journalism. Her writing has been published in Valley Magazine, City Weekend Shanghai, Penn State GeoBlog and Shanghai Daily. You can follow her on Twitter, @kasumihrkw

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Today at Noon EDT: #YouOkSIS? Tweet Chat

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Via News One:

“If you’re a woman, there’s a good chance you may have been harassed on the street. Have you ever wanted to someone to help you when you were in that most uncomfortable situation? Or if you’re a man, have you seen a woman being harassment on the street but wasn’t sure how to help her? Well, NewsOne interviewed some women in New York City and asked them to give their suggestions of ways someone could intervene in the event they are being harassed.

Also, NewsOne, along with special guest @FeministaJones, will host a town hall on Twitter TODAY, July 10 at 12 p.m. on the issue of street harassment and we’ll discuss practical ways we can all help stop it. Use the hashtag #YouOKSis?

For now, check out our video to see what women have to say about street harassment.”

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Serial Groper on NYC Subway Stops Because of PSAs

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DISGUSTING AND DESPICABLE!!! Via NY Daily News:

“For decades, John had a routine: Get up. Get dressed. Look for someone to sexually abuse on the way to work.

“I’d go into the subway thinking, ‘I’m going to find someone to touch’ and invariably I would,” John said. “If I didn’t, I just didn’t. But I usually had some kind of opportunity.”

A Daily News analysis of subway crime last month revealed women reported being victims of subway perverts more than 3,000 times during a five-year period ended in July 2013.

The NYPD Transit Bureau made an arrest in a majority — 67% — of those cases, Chief Joseph Fox said.

Unfortunately, John never felt the cold steel of handcuffs. He never spent time in a concrete jail cell with a bunch of bigger and bolder predators who would knock his teeth out just to pass the time.

“I never got arrested,” he said. “I only had a few really bad incidents. The worst was one in which a woman glared at me and said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ ”

John started slithering through crowded trains looking for “targets” when he got his first job making deliveries by subway, he said. He was 16. He continued while commuting to a white-collar job, and then into retirement, he said…

This subway sicko claimed he stopped three years ago.

That’s when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began broadcasting announcements urging riders to tell a transit worker or cop if they were a sex abuse victim or a witness to a sex crime. The fear of getting caught and exposed in a police crackdown became too great to continue, John said.

So let the crackdown begin. Put cameras in trains, triple undercover sting operations, post photos of repeat offenders in stations.”

It’s good to know at least one sexual abuser has stopped thanks to the PSAs… but it also makes me wonder if he’s just shifted to abusing women in other spaces instead.

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“No wonder women don’t want to ride bikes.”

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In many car-centric cities around the U.S., riding a bike on a city street is equivalent to sticking a target on your back. Being a woman on a bike makes that target 10 times bigger and 10 times brighter.

As much as I love riding my bike, there are times when I feel unsafe and violated, such as when I pull up alongside a bus shelter and a man yells out, “Damn girl. Where you going? You must be riding a lot with an ass like that!” I can’t wait for the light to change so I can get the hell away from this situation.

I never know quite how to respond. A motorist rolls down his window to tell me how lucky my bike is to be ridden by me. I just smile and try to shrug it off, knowing who holds the power in this situation, Often I try to avoid potential situations altogether, changing routes where I know I often get yelled at or not riding at certain times. I once spent a summer as a pedicabber (one of my favorite jobs I ever had), but never took the night shifts after my boss warned me I’d probably be harassed by drunk male college students. Try as I might, street harassment cannot be avoided. A pedestrian once yelled, “I want to cum all over you” on a Sunday afternoon on one of Kansas City’s busiest streets. I didn’t know how to respond other than to break down in tears as I started to climb a hill.

I endure the catcalls on a daily basis and for the most part learn to live with it. But when a few weeks ago, one of my best friends got to work and started crying because a man yelled, “I want to suck your pussy,” on the ride in, I became furious. Words like that are violating and unjust. Too many women are getting hurt.

“No wonder women don’t want to ride bikes,” she said.

It is a well-known fact that women ride bikes at much lower rates than men. In 2009, women accounted for only 24% of all bicycle trips in the U.S. In addition, 24% of women refrain from exercising outdoors in general in order to avoid public sexual harassment and assault, according to the most recent report by Stop Street Harassment. A few bike advocacy groups nationwide have begun to recognize the importance of getting more women on bikes, by hosting forums and summits. For example, the Washington Area Bicycle Association recently hosted a workshop for female cyclists about fighting street harassment.

I do not have a choice when it comes to exercising outdoors as I do not own a car that I can use as a shield from harassment. My bike cannot camouflage the fact that I wear a skirt or a dress every single day–a fact many of my female friends sometimes have a hard time believing. “I try not to wear a skirt when I bike. I seem to attract more negative attention from men,” a friend once told me. I’m not going to let fear stop me from wearing what I want to wear. A woman on a bike is not eye candy for motorists, she is not riding for the attention or the praise. She is riding because she simply loves to ride her bike. She is a cyclist and the road is as much hers as it is yours.

Sexual harassment is not merely a “women’s issue.” It is a mobility issue. If women do not feel safe biking to work or to run simple errands to the grocery store, how can we expect them to pursue alternative modes of transportation? Just as cyclists have the same rights to the roads as motorists, women must have the same rights as cyclists as men.

Heavy traffic, debris in the road, and a lack of bicycle facilities would be enough to deter any woman from riding a bicycle. It is great that cities are beginning to invest more in building bike facilities, such as bike lanes to encourage individuals to use bicycles as a mode of transportation, but the issue of getting more women on bikes extends beyond infrastructure improvements. A bike lane is not going to make a woman feel much safer when she is going to be harassed every day. Without a dramatic change in culture, female cyclists will remain a minority on the landscapes of our streets, their targets still strapped firmly to their backs.

Rachel Krause is a cyclist who is active in the Kansas City bike community. She publishes a feminist bicycling zine called Velo Vixen.

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Petition: Banjo Billy’s Bus Tours: Stop harassing women on the street!

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Check out and consider signing this new Change.org Petition!!

“Banjo Billy’s Bus Tours have been helping tourists fall in love with Boulder, Colorado with their nautical bus decorations and fun stories about local folklore since 2005. However, they took their goofy humor too far when they installed a button that the driver can push to make the bus produce a loud and cartoonish wolf whistle towards a women as the bus passes her.

I was that woman a few days ago when I was crossing the street in front of the bus, and felt the familiar embarrassment and disrespect that always comes with street harassment as the busload of tourists laughed at my expense. When I called to complain, the company was sorry I was offended but maintained that the button was all in good fun.

I have recently turned eighteen and I believe it is unacceptable for a bus driver twice my age to make judgments about my appearance to entertain his passengers. Please help me tell Banjo Billy’s Bus Tours that this street harassment has to end!”

H/T Hollaback!

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